SEA CHANGE TANIA AEBI, UNOFFICIALLY THE FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN AND YOUNGEST PERSON TO SAIL AROUND THE WORLD ALONE, LONGS FOR THE CRUISING LIFE.

"Out of the past two and a half years, I had spent 360 days alone at sea, pressing ever westward, ever homeward. This final landfall would close the -- From Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi

Any schlep can sail around the world. That's the way Tania Aebi makes it sound.

But try selling a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.

These days, Aebi -- unofficially the first American woman and youngest person to sail around the world alone -- is saddled with real estate and longs to return to the cruising life.

Not that Aebi, 24, yearns to sail solo again.

"I can't," she says. "I've got a husband and a kid."

She has a husband she met when she anchored her 26-foot sloop next to his sailboat on an island in the Southwest Pacific. (They went on to sail almost half the world, side-by-side, except when they lost track of each other at night or in storms.) And she almost has a child. Aebi, pronouced "abbey," is expecting in May.

She and her Swiss husband, Olivier Berner, are trying to start a boat- delivery business. They plan to live on a sailboat, but there's one hitch: "We bought an apartment. And we can't sell it. We're making payments on this stupid apartment."

-- Landfall, Fort Lauderdale. It is Aebi's last stop on a four-city East Coast lecture tour, sponsored by Cruising World magazine and the Boat Owners Association of The United States. Her mode of transportation: commercial airline.

Aebi wrapped up her round-the-world voyage in November 1987, but she still draws a crowd. On this night, she will retrace her global adventure and misadventures for about 400 people in a high school auditorium.

"I don't know if the trip changed me or I just got older. Everybody changes between 18 and 21. I don't have the objectivity to look down on myself and say what has changed," she says in a pre-lecture interview at her oceanside hotel.

Above the Atlantic, a man with a parasail is riding in the air.

"Look," Aebi says, grinning. "Is he parachuting behind that boat? That looks like fun. Nothing can happen to you. You just enjoy the view."

Aebi has thick, dark hair and slate blue eyes. She wears no makeup. Her clothing is loose, her pants legs rolled up. A tattoo she got in Samoa circles one of her ankles. She seems relaxed, self-effacing.

"My father always says that I changed, that I'm more responsible, that I'm a more interesting person," says Aebi, who before her voyage worked as a bicycle messenger in New York City. "But what's interesting anyway? Just because I've got a story to tell now?"

The voyage was her father's idea. Ernst Aebi saw the sea as his daughter's reform school. Her friends were punks, and she had been hanging out in bars until 4 a.m. As she once said, "The only thing my father or I could ever count on me to finish was a meal."

She remembers her father telling her: "You're a great kid. But I don't know about your future. It's pretty pathetic. You don't want to go to college. And I don't want to pay for any college that you would get into anyway. I've got an idea. What if I buy you a boat and you sail it around the world?"

Says Aebi, shrugging: "I didn't have any other plans."

-- She named her boat Varuna. In Maiden Voyage, the book she wrote about her trip, she says the boat was named for the "Hindu goddess of the cosmos."

Varuna cost her father, an artist and a landlord, about $40,000 fully provisioned, she says. To make expenses, Aebi agreed to write articles along the way and send them to Cruising World.

She left New York Harbor in May 1985. She was 18. She had sailed before, but never alone. Her only company was a cat.

"There was never anybody to pick a fight with, to try and let loose some of the aggressions and anxieties I felt. So every time I was really scared or it was all fear or anxiety or depression and got to such a point that I couldn't control it anymore, I started screaming and crying and cursing everything around me," she says. "I felt a lot better."

Aebi didn't even know how to navigate when she set off on her voyage. She had a mail-order navigation course with her, but it didn't seem to make sense.

"I was too embarrassed to ever go up to anybody and ask them for help because here I am ostensibly a single-handed sailor," she says. "I'm supposed to be sailing around the world by myself. And to actually go up to somebody and say, 'Hey -- I don't know how to navigate. Can you help me?"'

She figured it out for herself sometime after traveling 750 miles from New York to Bermuda, the first leg of her journey.

After Bermuda, Aebi's 27,000-mile odyssey took her through the Caribbean and Panama Canal and to the Galapagos. From there, she sailed across the South Pacific to Australia and across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean.

She and Berner, who met on the island of Vanuatu, parted in Malta.

Aebi embarked on the final passage home -- across the Atlantic -- from Gibraltar in September 1987. The crossing took 50 days.

"Since it was my last trip, I didn't feel like I was in any special hurry. It was a little sad."

At night, she remembers, she dreamed of company, of someone helping her.

"Somebody going out and changing the sail because the wind's picking up. I didn't like going out on the foredeck and getting wet and sprayed on and having to deal with the sails. But I'd have to do it anyway."

Aebi turned 21 on the Atlantic, a month before New York appeared on her horizon.

-- The journey had its bad times. Aebi knew when she left New York that her mother, Sabine, was sick with cancer. She flew home from Tahiti to visit her before she died.

"I could only stay two weeks in New York because it was hurricane season and I had to get back to the boat. I knew it was definitely goodbye. I was really depressed. For a month, all I could do was cry."

Aebi also blew her chance at an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, she says, because she gave a woman in Samoa an 80-mile lift to a neighboring island.

"It was a little bit stupid. It couldn't have hurt anything in my life to have the record, to have not taken her." But Aebi had her reasons: "In 27,000 miles, 80 isn't a lot."

And, just outside the Suez Canal, a ship hit her. She had gone below to make a cup of coffee.

"All of a sudden, I heard a horn honking. And I ran out and there was a ship bearing right down on me."

It ripped off her forestay, one of the cables that holds up the mast.

"That was easily fixable. But the real repercussion of being hit by a ship was that it changed my nights forever."

She never slept soundly again.

Then, in the Mediterranean, a storm nearly ruined her.

"It was this weird cloud with lots of lightning and thunder underneath it. I was really tired at that point. It wasn't something that happened because of the ocean. It was because I was really exhausted and I didn't do the things that I was supposed to do," she says.

"I went down to bed to sleep, thinking, 'I can't deal with this.' I didn't tie anything down. I didn't prepare the boat to deal with the wind and the waves as they were. I was exhausted, which is the worst problem for anybody alone on a boat."

The storm slammed Varuna on its side. A wall of water tumbled into the cabin.

"I lost everything. Sails, Kitty Litter, solar panel, pots and pans. The few electronics I had died."

Aebi and the cat still had a couple of hundred miles to go before they reached Spain. Badly shaken, she called her father from there. He met her in Gibraltar and helped her fix up the boat.

Then she set off for the final crossing.

Today, Aebi admits she misses the sailing life, despite its hardships. She misses the sailing life as an unfettered life, void of anchors in the form of Brooklyn apartments.

"You don't have to stay anywhere. You have total mobility. You don't have to pay any bills, except for port dues. You're free," she says.

"The only thing that can stop you from doing anything is the ocean itself."